Pain is not something you get directly from nerves: it's made up of a variety of components, including nociceptive stimulus (the thing we mostly think of when we say "pain" and aren't being strict about our terminology), contextual cues, and emotional state, along with neuropathy (damage to nerves or the nervous system) and neurogenic/neuroplastic components (either nociceptive nerves firing at way too low a threshold or the brain being primed to interpret non-nociceptive input as indicative of tissue damage or similar). Pain, sensu stricto, is an experience that is produced by the brain integrating all of these different inputs -- and that's what's meant by "all pain is in the brain".
I'm disabled, including multiple conditions commonly associated with chronic pain (more detail on which can be fairly readily gleaned by looking at my journal tags and post history); I have nontrivial familiarity with medical history, including my own disability activism; I am a scientist; I am currently in the early stages of a project to take all of the things I know and have experienced and have learned about pain and synthesise them into something useful to people who, like me, found the education provided by pain clinics actively unhelpful. (Several of my conditions are in fact associated with a propensity toward or increased risk of recurrent tissue damage, for example, so the chronic pain model doesn't fully explain my experiences.) This post is primarily a shorthand reminder to myself, but the clinical definitions are both relevant and important to what I'm wanting to do, here, so I'm going to be very insistent about using them in discussions on this topic in my space.
Re: Thoughts
Nope!
Pain is not something you get directly from nerves: it's made up of a variety of components, including nociceptive stimulus (the thing we mostly think of when we say "pain" and aren't being strict about our terminology), contextual cues, and emotional state, along with neuropathy (damage to nerves or the nervous system) and neurogenic/neuroplastic components (either nociceptive nerves firing at way too low a threshold or the brain being primed to interpret non-nociceptive input as indicative of tissue damage or similar). Pain, sensu stricto, is an experience that is produced by the brain integrating all of these different inputs -- and that's what's meant by "all pain is in the brain".
I'm disabled, including multiple conditions commonly associated with chronic pain (more detail on which can be fairly readily gleaned by looking at my journal tags and post history); I have nontrivial familiarity with medical history, including my own disability activism; I am a scientist; I am currently in the early stages of a project to take all of the things I know and have experienced and have learned about pain and synthesise them into something useful to people who, like me, found the education provided by pain clinics actively unhelpful. (Several of my conditions are in fact associated with a propensity toward or increased risk of recurrent tissue damage, for example, so the chronic pain model doesn't fully explain my experiences.) This post is primarily a shorthand reminder to myself, but the clinical definitions are both relevant and important to what I'm wanting to do, here, so I'm going to be very insistent about using them in discussions on this topic in my space.